Sequestration Scenarios and China's Counter-pivot

A little not-so-cheery U.S. Independence Day reading for you on the looming possibility of sequestration: Will Congress Avoid A $1T Budget Penalty?

If you were a betting person, which of the possible outcomes Jen lays out would you pick as most likely? For my part, I won't be surprised if we go right up to the deadline and then see them vote to bend the rules again, somehow.

Richard Fisher also has a discouraging perspective in China Counters U.S. Tilt Toward Asia.
He writes:

China's challenge during early 2012 was to exploit the Obama administration's intention to end its two-war planning strategy, by strengthening the potential for Chinese allies to tie down the U.S. in multiple conflicts. Prominently displayed in North Korea's April 15 parade was a large new missile on a 16-wheel transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) apparently manufactured by China's Sanjiang Hubei Special Vehicle Co., part of missile maker China Aerospace Industry and Science Co. (Casic). While China immediately denied making such a sale, the TEL is clearly a version of Sanjiang's WS51200 vehicle, that in turn was developed in cooperation with MAZ of Belarus, which makes TELs for Russia's ICBMs.

Fisher continues with a longer analysis of the posturing we've seen in the South China Sea.

What do you think: Is China looking for ways to obstruct or impede the U.S.?

Click to expand...

The link to the actual article is this.



The article itself is just more scaremongering trash.

All Fisher did is string together a load of completely unrelated events to try and make it look like some kind of massive conspiracy.

All of the 'issues' he raised has already been discussed in these forums and dismissed.

The sale of the TEL for NK was nothing of the sort. It has already been established that NK bought civilian heavy trucks from China under a fake front company and then adapted the trucks themselves into TEL.

Using that as 'evidence' that China has helping NK with it's nuclear weapons programme is pure hogwash. If China was helping NK with it's nuclear programme, NK's nuclear programme would not be the joke that it is, neither would it's long range missile programme.

The Scarborough Shoal stand-off has also been misrepresented willfully, and not at all skillfully to boot. Stressing the distance of the Shoal is a classic misrepresentation tactic to try and make it look like China is being unreasonable because the Shoal is further from China.

Fisher also completely glossed over the Philippine's many story changes and the massive inconsistencies in every version their story and failed to ask some blindly obvious questions.

For example, if the Philippines navy's flagship (glossing it's deployment as a 'policing action' should say all anyone needs to know about Fisher's bias) intercepted Chinese civilian fishermen on April 8th, how come they didn't arrest anyone until April 10th, when the Chinese civilian enforcement ships showed up?

It doesn't take a genius to see that the Philippines were deliberately trying to engineer a stand-off as there is absolutely no reason to send in a navy warship for a police action to start with, and even if there was a reason for sending it, there is no way in hell it would take them more than 2 days to arrest the fishermen if that is what they wanted to do, especially since the Philippines navy even boarded the Chinese fishing boats.

Trying to link the 071 task group into this incident is even more ridiculous and disingenuous as it is clear from their location, heading and course that they were just transiting through the area and made absolutely no moves to even try to get involved in the stand-off.

Just when you think Fisher could not be any more ridiculous, he characterized Sino-Russian joint naval exercises as China challenging America and tried to lump the long established annual SOC counter-terrorism exercises as somehow also related and also a challenge.

And finally, to put the cherry on top, he is making utterly fanciful claims of joint Sino, Russian and Syrian/Iranian exercises that no one else has ever mentioned or heard of.

I mean, there is your run of the mill internet trash, but this is taking it to a whole new level. And this is the guy congress gets briefings from? Sheesh!